Microsoft has invested heavily in Azure infrastructure and its ability to accommodate hybrid computing tasks—jobs that run partly on the Microsoft Azure public cloud and partly on customers’ data centers. Microsoft alone has more than twice as much cloud computing capacity in use than all the non-Amazon contenders combined.
3,4,5 have less than half of MS in revenue
Hapoel Jerusalem and Maccabi Tel Aviv
Cost – East US 2, Linux
A8 and A9 virtual machines feature Intel® Xeon® E5 processors. Adds a 40Gbit/s InfiniBand network with remote direct memory access (RDMA) technology
When configured with the necessary network drivers, the A8 and A9 instances can communicate with other A8 and A9 instances over a low-latency, high-throughput network in Azure that is based on remote direct memory access (RDMA) technology. A8 provides 10 Gb ethernet
D-series VMs are designed to run applications that demand higher compute power and temporary disk performance.
D-series VMs provide faster processors, a higher memory-to-core ratio, and a solid-state drive (SSD) for the temporary disk.
For details, see the announcement on the Azure blog,New D-Series Virtual Machine Sizes.
Dv2-series, a follow-on to the original D-series, features a more powerful CPU.
The Dv2-series CPU is about 35% faster than the D-series CPU. It is based on the latest generation 2.4 GHz Intel Xeon® E5-2673 v3 (Haswell) processor, and with the Intel Turbo Boost Technology 2.0, can go up to 3.2 GHz.
The Dv2-series has the same memory and disk configurations as the D-series.
DS-series and GS-series VMs can use Premium Storage, which provides high-performance, low-latency storage for I/O intensive workloads. These VMs use solid-state drives (SSDs) to host a virtual machine’s disks and also provide a local SSD disk cache. Premium Storage is available in certain regions. For details, see Premium Storage: High-performance storage for Azure virtual machine workloads.
G-series VMs offer the biggest size and best performance and run on hosts that have Intel Xeon E5 V3 family processors.
G5 has double the spec values of G4
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/aa/Floppy_disk_2009_G1.jpg
http://www.datastax.com/2015/04/getting-started-with-azure-premium-storage-and-datastax-enterprise-dse
Durability based on LRS (Locally Redundant system) – 3 replicas in the same region.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/aa/Floppy_disk_2009_G1.jpg
http://www.datastax.com/2015/04/getting-started-with-azure-premium-storage-and-datastax-enterprise-dse
Commitlog on ephemeral storage
The Azure equivalent of AWS VPC
~20ms (West US, California to South-Central US, Texas)
No-crypto option, get additional bandwidth
AA has 2 VNETs, one for the application and another for management
You can control access by using Network Security Groups (NSGs).
VNets can be connected to each other, and even to your on-premises datacenter, by using a site-to-site VPN connection
Every VM is associated with an upgrade and a fault domain.
A fault domain is a rack of computers. the allocation of a fault domain is determined by Azure at VM deployment time. A service owner can not control the allocation of a fault domain.
An upgrade domain is a strategy to ensure an application stays up and running, while undergoing an update of the application. Azure will distribute instances evenly into multiple upgrade domains with each upgrade domain as a logical unit of a deployment. When upgrading a deployment, it is then carried out one upgrade domain at a time. The steps are: stopping the instances running in the first upgrade domain, upgrading the application, bringing the instances back online followed by repeating the steps in the next upgrade domain.
Every VM is associated with an upgrade and a fault domain.
A fault domain is a rack of computers. the allocation of a fault domain is determined by Azure at VM deployment time. A service owner can not control the allocation of a fault domain.
An upgrade domain is a strategy to ensure an application stays up and running, while undergoing an update of the application. Azure will distribute instances evenly into multiple upgrade domains with each upgrade domain as a logical unit of a deployment. When upgrading a deployment, it is then carried out one upgrade domain at a time. The steps are: stopping the instances running in the first upgrade domain, upgrading the application, bringing the instances back online followed by repeating the steps in the next upgrade domain.
Every VM is associated with an upgrade and a fault domain.
A fault domain is a rack of computers. the allocation of a fault domain is determined by Azure at VM deployment time. A service owner can not control the allocation of a fault domain.
An upgrade domain is a strategy to ensure an application stays up and running, while undergoing an update of the application. Azure will distribute instances evenly into multiple upgrade domains with each upgrade domain as a logical unit of a deployment. When upgrading a deployment, it is then carried out one upgrade domain at a time. The steps are: stopping the instances running in the first upgrade domain, upgrading the application, bringing the instances back online followed by repeating the steps in the next upgrade domain.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhqSmc9meMw
https://vimeopro.com/user35188327/cassandra-summit-2015/video/140949184
G1 GC reduced pause times quite a bit, RF=3 in every DC